In the blood

I am a first-generation Marylander.  In other words, I am the offspring of immigrants.  Parents who immigrated to Maryland.  From another state.  In the mid-west.

You can see this in the way I was raised.  I grew up thinking soda was called "pop."  I got teased for pronouncing the word "on" like "awn" instead of "ahn."  We grew up on meat and potatoes.  And even though I grew up going to the beach every summer and even catching crabs by the pier with chicken necks, we always threw them back.  

I know.  Try to hide your shock.

I picked my own crab for the very first time when I was 18 years old, at my friend Kyle's graduation party crab feast with this family.  His dad showed me how to do it.  I only had one, then sipped my soda (yup, I adapted...I'd learned the local dialect by then, in spite of speaking mid-western at home) and munched on some chips.  I liked the crab, but it just took a little getting used to.

Ten years later, I'm a crab convert.  I like them a lot, although I probably prefer shrimp.  I like Old Bay, even though I don't put it on my fries like a good Marylander.  (My high school even had Old Bay in the cafeteria with the condiments every day!)  And I sure do love a good crab feast, for the food and friends, even it pulling apart a small shelled creature to pick it's bones makes me feel a little like a raccoon.

My family has started a tradition of doing a crab dinner at the beach one time each summer.  We have our favorite spot and we pick a night and enjoy.  The girls loved looking at some shells in some baskets.

Mom and Dad.

Me and mine.
Small fact:  Humidity makes the nerve damage in my right cheek worse.  I wonder why?

Bean loves crabs, although she seemed to have forgotten that fact this year after she saw them on the table.  We thought Sweet Pea would love them, too.  She loved hitting them with the mallet.

She liked looking at their faces.  Carefully.

But eat them?  Not a fat. chance.

She may be a Marylander, born and bred, but it's meat and potatoes all the way for my little American girl, the granddaughter of mid-Westerners and the great-granddaughter of an Englishman on one side and an Irishman on the other.

Maybe next year, Sweet Pea.

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